State of the art transceiver products are often made by assembling a number of discrete components on one or more printed circuit boards. Where this is the case, the circuitry may be quite flexible and capable of accommodating a variety of configurations and features. Such transceiver systems are hampered, however, by the fact that manufacture on a variety of disparate printed circuit boards increases the size and mass of the system. Moreover, such distributed systems typically introduce large delays, because during operation the signals must travel over large areas.
In view of these disadvantages, some transceiver manufacturers have attempted to build integrated transceiver systems. In these systems, a single integrated circuit may accommodate a variety of components. Thus, integrated transceiver systems offer an advantage in size and weight over disparate, non-integrated systems. Moreover, integrated transceiver systems offer an advantage in that shorter delays are introduced, because the traces or paths that each signal must travel are shorter.
Integrated systems, however, face serious disadvantages as well. These disadvantages are a result, in large part, of the close proximity of signal paths to one another. That is, as circuitry is packed closer together, integrated systems experience cross-talk and interference, particularly where signals are in a same or similar frequency range. Interference may ultimately render defective or at least unreliable an integrated transceiver system. Thus, integrated transceiver designers are limited, by space constraints, to a selection of perhaps fewer than all of the components available on more traditional non-integrated systems. Moreover, interference concerns require further design concessions. As an example, many current integrated transceiver systems are only tunable to a single frequency band which must be manually programmed at the time of manufacture. Likewise, modern integrated transceivers are often unable to automatically vary their gain. Rather, gain is most often tuned, and set permanently, at the time of manufacture. Modern integrated transceiver products also typically have no facility for reporting telemetry data and rely for communication upon separate transmit and receive ports. Indeed, most modern integrated transceiver systems operate in a half-duplex mode. Finally, most integrated transceiver systems available today, although they may perform some form of temperature compensation, are limited to compensating for internal changes in temperature. That is, prior art systems do not compensate for temperature changes that occur externally, e.g., at an amplifier coupled to the transceiver.